You know it is posted on their twitter. Lon Wong have also posted his response and it is posted on their twitter as well. @nemfoundation have you read that? too bad for you for not having a telegram account it’s like you missing out many opportunities/important news there. Not only am I talking about NEM, but other projects as well. About the coindesk article, do you really think the foundation admin would post such FUDs on their twitter/subreddit? Not even tron does that. So if you’re into crypto, please keep this in mind: if you want news about your “investment (read: gambling)” coin, do take action to find it yourself instead of waiting something to moon. It’s your decision from the get go to play in this game. Your fault for not selling this at ath when shit became too obvious for you.

You are obviously one of those “fanboys”. Do you want to tell me, that this is normal? You obviously got things completely out of context. I have never said anything about posting Coindesk articles on Twitter.

Too bad for me not having a Telegram account? It is COMPLETELY wrong to have news only on one registration-only platform.

Thank you for the transparency, I hope this is just the first step in regards to the NEM Foundations past and its future.

Do we know what the fiat equivalent of the funds spent was? At 9million XEM per month and some rough calculations it looks like it’s around the $30million mark plus another $4million in USD from what I’m hearing.

That’s a lot of money and given what I saw from the Foundation in that time I’m struggling to think of where it could have gone. You mentioned a questionable ROI but I think that is putting it lightly.

Do you know exactly how these funds were spent yet? Who received what amount and for what services. How much were spent on expenses such as flights, hotels, meals etc. A full breakdown would be a good start.

Did the Foundation really have 150 employees? That is a lot and I don’t see how we had work for 150 people on a daily basis.

Maybe that didn’t seem like a big problem when the XEM price was high, but it’s a very big problem as we seek to sustain a viable organization in the ‘Crypto Winter.’

This is scary logic in the crypto space. I know I personally brought up the potential negative effects of a crypto bear market across the forum (as did many others) and numerous times in a couple of the ‘Project Proposal’ threads (This was all pre bear market. See the BlockGrain thread).

In this case Blockgrain lied about continuing regardless of price fluctuations and very quickly ran away. If the bull market had continued they would have stolen millions of $ worth of additional funds and all this was done right under the nose of the Foundation.

Foundation employees were still getting paid during this time I’m guessing. Up until now (all funds spent) it appears Foundation employees were paid regardless of performance and only now is the Foundation as a whole reaping what it sowed. Is this correct?

I think that is why I would urge caution before quickly approving additional funds until we have further transparency regarding the Foundations past spending and future spending. We can’t repeat history.

I think that no-one would argue that in the workplace and in organisations such as this, employees should be held accountable for how they earn their pay check.

The community should be able to see that accountability and also judge for itself. I know the Foundation is now having meetings twice per week, I’d expect a community report on a regular basis if I was to support additional funds and a brief Q&A with the community in that thread regarding progress.

We cannot apologize for the past decisions before we came into leadership, but we want to let you know that there is hope for the future.

I don’t want to burn the Foundation at the stake but even so this leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. We all know some Foundation members worked very hard but even so many of you were in senior positions when this was happening. It actually makes it more scary, not re-assuring, if you are saying you had no idea.

In closing I just want to say I personally think the Foundation/Foundation employees previously had a bit of Hubris and, not all, but many members thought they were above the community.

Many community members have been in the crypto space for a long time, work in the crypto space themselves and could see very obvious flaws with how the Foundation was operating but they were often ignored.

Every so often there would be a big hoopla and the Foundation would promise they would listen to the community more……it lasted about 3 days each time. Now the Foundation is here asking for more money.

I think it has to first win back the communities trust with further transparency.

where is jabo 38 and alex ???
also why need the foundation if all the work make from DEVS
really does not understand
FOUNDATION IS GARBAGE AT NEM COIN
THE NEW PRESIDENT AT ALMOST 1 MONTH DESTROY NEM
ALSO WE MUST KNOW WHEN WE
THE ORIGINAL STAKEHOLDERS
WILL PAID FROM SILVER COIN FUND
YOU WHY NOT TELL ANYONE HERE ABOUT THAT

WHAT WILL BE OURRRRRR SILVER COIN FUNDS
IS OURS AND NOT AT GARBAGE FOUNDATIONS HANDS]

WE NEEED ANSWER TODAY ABOUT THAT
AND REALLY BETTER FOR NEM FOUNDATION NOT HAVE MONEY
IS BETTER FOR NEM
FOUNDATION MUST CLOSED
ALSO SOMEONE CHEATING HERE
WE NEED ANSWER FROM THE NEW COUNSIL
ASAP

What was the 9 million per month spent on and by whom? What value did it add, and what are the new foundation going to do differently?

Reading reports it was related to marketing? Where did they advertise on the billboards of Times Square? They could have advertised on Times squares largest billboard for 3 years at that price. Money wasters.

Thanks for the transparency. We voted for this type of drastic change and openness, although painful to swallow. To me this is good and necessary. Lots of questions still in people’s minds, would be good to address what Coindesk mentions about the 160MM …

Community wants to know more about expenses both past and future, the more detail the better. Future more important as past can’t be changed.

Fat needs to be cut, to be more lean, agile, and effective. For price short-term bad, but good long-term.
Saw this tweet from Jaguar:twitter.com

I think it is extremely important to keep perspective, and trust the current Council team.

They have told us the problems they face, but also the promising future Nem still has, providing that the financial measures are applied, as explained via the original post.

Already there are panic/FUD comments on here, which are really unhelpful.

This will certainly discourage any company or individual looking at investing/building upon Nem.

I do understand the frustration of many Nembers due to the big drop in value during this last year. However, as this does apply to virtually all of the other Cryptocurrencies, there was - it seems, no way of avoiding this.

If we want Nem to succeed, we need to support the Foundation/Council, and spread positive news rather than the negative comments littering the internet.

Nem has a promising future - imo. We just need to do our bit to advertise this - Reddit, Facebook, Telegram, Pinterest blogs etc, need to be full of Nems benefits and reasons to use and invest in it.

It is up to the community to turn this around, just as much as it is up to the Council to take us forward.

First off, thanks for your support. The 2019 Council has been working diligently to solve for many issues that came to light when we took office on January 1, 2019. We will soon be sharing our funding proposal and providing more clarity on funds from 2018 and how this shaped our operations in 2019. The current proposal is being vetted to the core devs and legal before it will be shared to the community. This is to ensure facts are presented correctly. We appreciate everyone’s understanding on this.

Hi Dan,
Upon secured funding for the new Foundation proposal, the hiring process for the open positions will extend externally so that all may apply. We will not be doing a POI vote on positions.

Also, it’s worth noting that the 2017-18 NEM Foundation was originally created to help promote and educate the community about the NEM technology and be the trustee to help make decisions for the public chain. The 2019 Foundation after consideration from the community and ecosystem partners has decided to move from an organization model where regional heads market NEM, to a more traditional centralized business model that focuses around the product development and service. This is why we added the new product teams including CMO, CTO, CPO, etc. I want to be clear that the NEM Foundation operates as a separate entity and is one of many ecosystem contributors to the NEM open-source project. Therefore the NEM Foundation is not NEM. The NEM open source project remains strong and thriving.

Hi - thanks for this question. During the transition from the 2018 Council to the 2019 Council, operating funds were temporarily inaccessible until the new leadership took office on January 1, 2019. This was due to transition registration problems with our bank. All operational funds were safe and untouched during this transition. When the 2019 Council took office, a financial audit was done and showed the new leadership had low operational funds and therefore could not sustain the burn rate of the previous 2018 operations. Therefore, a new Foundation restructure proposal was created and operations and staff were suspended until additional funding was secured.

The full report of the restructure and funds being requested hasn’t been given to the community yet, but is in its final stages of preparation and will be shared soon. Up until this point, the community’s response has been generally positive. A new Council was elected on the promise of change and so the community is welcoming the restructure.

Hi, this is not true. No one was using the funds for personal enjoyment. There weren’t effective policies put in place in 2017 and 2018 that captured all data spend BUT from the records we do have, we can see that funding was mainly spent on marketing, events, salaries, travel and trainings. We have shared complete transparency with the devs on all the auditing from 2018. This is why the new NEM Foundation restructure was immediately put into place. The new policies and moving to a product-focused structure offers complete transparency to the community on how funds will be spent and allocated.

You were quite vocal the past year on wanting to see more transparency on funds and strategy on adoption. We agree with you 100%. It’s why we immediately spent the first part of January doing a complete audit of ALL regions and teams. When we learned that we weren’t given enough operational spend to continue past the next month, we immediately stopped all marketing, events, MoUs, and partnerships. The newly elected 2019 leadership team is optimistic about the future of the NEM Foundation and it’s why the 2019 restructure was important. We will share more details on the proposal and past spend from 2018 soon.

Correct. I want to be clear that the NEM Foundation operates as a separate entity and is one of many ecosystem contributors to the NEM open-source project. Therefore the NEM Foundation is not NEM. The NEM open source project remains strong and thriving.

The NEM Foundation financial situation doesn’t prevent Catapult from moving forward. The core developers are not paid through the NEM Foundation nor do they report to the NEM Foundation. Again, the NEM Foundation 2019 team is working on securing funding to continue to support Catapult to the best of our abilities but from a organizational structure that is transparent, aligned with Catapult, and completely pivots away from the regional-based organizational structure in 2018.

From the start of 2019, the new Council faced many challenges (that we will share with everyone soon.) For sure the biggest challenge was regarding getting a better understanding on the financial situation that was handed to us from 2018. During the transition from the 2018 Council to the 2019 Council, operating funds were temporarily inaccessible until the new leadership took office on January 1, 2019. This was due to transition registration problems with our bank. All operational funds were safe and untouched during this transition. When the 2019 Council took office, a financial audit was done and showed the new leadership had low operational funds and therefore could not sustain the burn rate of the previous 2018 operations. Therefore, a new Foundation restructure proposal was created and operations and staff were suspended until additional funding was secured.

Coindesk has gone back and amended their article per our request. There were some misconceptions clearly exaggerated in the article but that’s pretty normal for media in general. Coindesk took a more sensational approach which is NOT the narrative I would have preferred. I don’t know who all they spoke with but the messaging provided to them was specifically around the restructure (in the blog post above.) I believe the 202 members they assumed were to be voting on the new Foundation 2.0 proposal comes from the article posted on how many members participated in the NEM elections in 2018! Clearly we have MORE community members than 202 people.